“Are there more victims than three?”

Surely. But we’re working with three bodies.

The unfortunate victims are three related words: (1) Culture, (2) Agriculture and (3) Cult.

Don’t be too broken up.

In this introductory narrative, you are a detective, or perhaps you’re at the trial- but not the funeral.

Whichever the case, your focus is to be directed toward a mysterious catch: witnesses report that the perpetrator only shot one of the deceased. Specifically, the Industrial Revolution shot the Agricultural Revolution, it was at point-blank range and done with a single bullet with no exit wound.

Nevertheless, three bodies bled out and died.

Furthermore, the autopsies conclude the same cause and time of death for each.

“Weird.”

Yes. It raises many questions. Of central concern; are we to assume the relationship between culture, agriculture and cult stops at their name - i.e., is their shared root-word, “cult” arbitrary, or does it point toward something deeper?

Can we connect the death of each victim?

Do we charge Industrialization with three counts or one?

That is what we’re calling into question.

What does the word “cult” mean—? To begin our exploration, I must first address my distaste for the word’s contemporary usage. When a group is labeled as a cult, it is rarely complimentary. As a flippant charge, it can mean a broad variety of things with varying degrees of severity. And while I am certain that there are many out there deserving of such vague defamation, the issue of imprecision remains. So to clarify at the outset, we are not isolating our understanding of the word 'Cult' to the modern standard. When used in this piece, it should not be met with a negative connotation. It is instead to be treated neutrally, and it will lend itself to valid description of even mild organizations (e.g., ones tending to meet on Sunday).

Whether you interpreted the parenthetical conclusion of the last sentence as implicating church-related or football-related rituals makes little difference here. In any case, this essay is about more than cults. In fact, it primarily concerns itself with culture, but as you may have noticed, 'cult-' is embedded in the word 'Culture,' and each word is nested in 'Agriculture.' What strikes me as curious about this relationship goes beyond an otherwise unremarkable commonality, and extends to my central claim:

I argue that the shared cognate between these words is not arbitrary, and submit that culture and the cultic meaning that originally bound culture has "died" due to the gradual loss of an agricultural base.

I am suggesting that the three words indicate, and have always indicated an interdependent phenomena. Regardless of their spelling, all words are tied at the semantic level. This is because culture itself was the cause and consequence of the Agricultural Revolution, which settled previously nomadic hominins on land through farming (i.e., through cultivation). Both culture and early agricultural settlements were then bound, reinforced and defined by cults, i.e., through the settlements’ shared rituals, symbols and religion. So, this theory views the origin of culture as the origin of agriculture, and cultic ritual as necessary, if not entirely synonymous with culture at its root.

This mutualistic process began in the Neolithic period and lasted until around AD 1800. It was the era of culture in its truest sense, as this is the period from which the words and definitions find their origin, and it has gradually “ended” in relation to industrial societies' growth. That is to say that, for better or worse, industrialization occurred at the expense of agrarian society, and culture declined in due course.

As a contingency, if there is culture in the post-industrial present, (in some novel sense of the word), I will grant that it is a culture removed of the conditions that once created and sustained it: agriculture and cults.

Another solidifying component of the three cognate-bound processes was that each catalyzed genetic drift as various post-nomadic peoples fixed themselves to cultivable land, and as populations then became separated by novel physical and non-physical borders. Farms implied territory, which would instill cultural emergence; a group’s culture and genetics then coevolved in relation to their given linguistic, genetic, climactic, geographic, dietary, social, and behavioral environments1. The genetic adaptations accrued by generations of humans living in these separate environments, over evolutionary time, would help ensure the distinct and recognizable presence of culture (and explain an observable correlation between culture and ethnicity).

When suggesting that there is some degree of mutual interdependence between the three words, I must emphasize again that the etymology behind ‘cult,’ ‘culture’ and ‘agriculture’ are not what binds them, or at least, not necessarily. The shared cognate only hints at the unifying causes and consequences. The words reflect a deeper historical or semantic "reality" rather than merely containing shared symbols. With that, I would implore my lovely reader to go beyond asking what a word means, and also ask what the meaning does (intentionally or otherwise) in relation to humans and their history.

Duh in advance, but words are not concepts, and certainly not realities. As I argue however; they point toward both, so we’ll the need the interplay of 'the lexical', 'the semantic', and the history for our exploration to take us anywhere worth going. This is where I maintain that etymology proves to be a most revealing tool toward that end. Understanding the words at their root will take’s us back to an environment where the differing meanings were not yet estranged from one another.

This leads us back to Cult-, which finds provenance in Proto-Indo-European. It was derived from the reconstructed base, “kwel-” (also appearing as “kwol-,” “quel-,” or “quol-”) which signified concepts like “residing,” “turning” and “movement.”2 In the latter cases it aligns with modern English words like wheel.3 But in the original tongue, the movement-oriented terms would be generalized and eventually mean things like “busy,” perhaps implying labor as a metaphoric extension of movement.4

The various meanings packaged in the word would later bifurcate into two semantic directions: “inhabiting a place” and “making a wild place suitable for crops.”5 Functionally speaking, both meanings ran together in the sense that; it’s hard to make a place suitable for crops if not first inhabiting it. So one seems to be a prerequisite for the other. In any case, both of these concepts would later be integrated into a single Latin word, Colere, housing three definitions: to ‘inhabit,’ to ‘cultivate,’ and to ‘worship.’6

The semantic notions of inhabitance would be reflected by another descendent of Colere: the word ‘colony’, and ‘colonization.’ Colony would get at the literal- then the metaphorical 'planting of seeds' and 'embedding of roots' - with colonus originally meaning farmer.7

“If semantics take priority here, then how did we start with wheel and end up with colony—?” A very fair question to ask if semantics took priority here, and not least because Colony has since deviated from the “farm-oriented” definition just described. Using the modern definition of Colony, we get: “an area over which a foreign nation or state extends or maintains control.”8 ←Now, with that in mind, let’s play a word-association game:

Did you think of wheel? I seriously doubt it. Again, this is why we need the interplay of history to demonstrate the way in which wheel and colonial empire are, in fact, effectually synonymous.

Wheel seems so innocent in comparison, but let's not be naive. There’s a reason Indo-Europeans spread their language to the point of its embedded status in (probably) every word used on this digital page. Millenia ago, these inventors of 'cult-,' and their less-than-innocent wheel would eventually go on to apply the word to chariots. Also implying mobility, the word cannot be separated from the Indo-European cultivation of an entire continent - an expansionistic endeavor. They made a wild place suitable before inhabiting their many victims' lands. And yes, they were certainly engaged in colonization. They colonized in every sense of the word: archaeological evidence finds that after an invasion, Indo-Europeans of the Yamnaya culture “exterminated the men in the farming and hunter-gatherer populations they encountered, while incorporating the surviving women into their community;” this is precisely why DNA samples still find that “most people in Europe share Yamnaya ancestry.”9

Strictly in the Darwinian sense, and putting quality of art, general manners and all that aside; the presence of genes and language certainly imply cultural success. Certain behaviors are rewarded more so than others, and this reality for genes can be effectively applied to a given culture. Today, simply the presence of language and genes are an indication of past cultural success, and vice versa; the presence of a culture implies an extant language and surviving genes.

The spread of each correlates for obvious-enough reasons: language, culture and genes tend to descend from parent to offspring. But another obvious metric to measure success could relate to the territorial expanse of a culture, its language, and its genes - which again, all jointly-correlate, and are all designated forms of colonization. It is the mobility of their spread that attaches such concepts to “quel-” / “quol-.”

Regarding the Agricultural Revolution, the domestication of plants and animals tends to occupy the most attention, and fair enough; domestication was the key technical innovation of the Agricultural Revolution. But the interdependent social innovation of this Neolithic event was settlement. Just like the former, the latter solved a set of problems, (hence the innovation’s wide adoption) and the problems it solved are inseparable from the Revolution’s occurrence. Which is why settlement cannot be removed from agriculture. Simply, farming cannot occur absent of land from which one farms.

So, "to cultivate" in the original sense was effectually the same as "to colonize" in the current sense; to farm is inherently expansionistic so long as there is demand for sustenance. If demand for food induced the settlement, then as long as the incipient demands were met, the population grew, and so too would this multiply the demand for food as a consequence, which would cyclically incentivize further settlement.

There’s much more to be said on this far-reaching topic. I still must address the ways in which cultic religion bound infant cultures; (2) explain how that further bound people to land; (3) emphasize the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation; (4) show why culture is dead (which means something rather specific here, and demands elaboration of how it emerged to begin with), and finally; (5) I must highlight the word “domestication” to explain that it went both ways: the domestication of plants and animals symmetrically domesticated mankind.

So again, there is much to be said. Fortunately these notions build from each other. For now, I only offer a simplifying restatement: the conditions that created and sustained culture have fundamentally changed. Until next time.

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Along with the quantitative advantage, the modernized army would gain a qualitative advantage after a coup led to new, self-coronated leadership. The Emperor would go on to manhandle his pre-modern Continental neighbors: Napoleon took on Prussia, Austria, Belgium, the Dutch Republic, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, Switzerland, the Italian Peninsula, Portugal, Spain, Russia, and the British Empire; each of the Continental states were occupied at some point during the war, leaving only the Maritime exception.4

But the exception proved to be more interesting than the rule. Britain was France’s chief antagonist throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and more broadly, since 1689 at the dawn of the Second Hundred's Years War; an eight-part conflict that began with England’s Glorious Revolutionary settlement. The new Dutch King of England, William III, and his sovereign, the newly empowered Parliament, would proceed to form a balancing coalition against the Sun King, Louis XIV of France—who, at the time, retained both naval supremacy and near-hegemonic power over the Continent. Only through the combined efforts of the Grand Alliance; the English, the Dutch, and the Habsburg monarchy, could France be balanced against.5 The Sun King would be defeated in this war, and over the course of the following century, Britain and France would be in a declared state of war for over 50% of that time.6 All the while, British incrementation in naval power rose in proportion to the French declension thereof.

It’s often recognized that the 1805 battle at Trafalgar solidified the British Empire’s famed naval supremacy held throughout the long nineteenth century.7 But this littoral struggle is rarely considered in its wider context: the bout began in the late seventeenth century, with the English entry into the War of the Grand Alliance in 1689, and Napoleon did not enter the ring until the eighth and final round.

Thucydides would have appreciated the long arc of this conflict as a declining power carried through three Louis and one Napoleon, each one facing off with a rising power across the Channel. The age of the Sun King’s amphibious rule had decisively passed upon the sea duel of 1805; decimating the French fleet, the British “triumph essentially concluded the naval struggle between Britain and France and ended Napoleon’s hopes of either invading Britain or restoring a French overseas empire.”8

Now left with few options, Napoleon thought better than to re-fight a shark in the water, and instead aimed to hit the commerce oriented power where it hurt most. Aptly named: the Continental System would be “the most important policy after 1806;” the year marked the Berlin Decree which “prohibited all trade between Britain and Europe;” with this decree, Napoleon had “ordered the seizure of goods originating from Britain and its colonies and the incarceration of all English subjects on the Continent.”9

Napoleon was thinking not dissimilarly to a German mentioned in my last post. Friedrich List, born in 1789, the same year as the Storming of the Bastille, would hold a Napoleonic, Continentally protective view articulated in his National System of Political Economy. Both Bonaparte and List alike recognized the Continent would develop reliance on British trade while Britain was in its burgeoning Industrial Revolution. Each observed the power this provided to the maritime hegemon and arrived at similar conclusions, the actualization of which would make for similar consequences as faced by France after 1806 as well as Germany in the First and Second World Wars.

For reasons to be described, autarky is enemy No. #1 for any maritime hegemon, and it’s of the few state behaviors they will traverse their own protective moat and enter into a costly war to prevent. More on this relationship to come, but put briefly, maritime powers rely on Continental reliance.

By 1812, the French Empire had reached its height. The army had grown to comprise 1,000,000 soldiers and their Emperor possessed a landmass spanning across the Continent. An impressive feat, but Napoleon would be defeated in 1814 just two years later, then more decisively in 1815. As was the case with Louis XIV four generations earlier, this could only be done in concert; it could only be done through a counterhegemonic balancing coalition of four great powers: Prussia, Austria, Russia, and most notably, the British Empire.10 In advance, the answer was "no," but as I shift to the more important section of this piece, Europe was asking the following question.

I was recently reminded of a corroborative, but almost inversive framework to the "multi-Hitlered" schema that structured my previous article: Hitler I, Hitler II, and Hitler III. It was reflected by Henry Kissinger in his 2014 work entitled World Order. With a familiar, tripartite design, Kissinger positions his telling of European modern history around three points on the timeline — each followed a period of total war: the Peace of Westphalia (~1648), the Congress of Vienna (~1815), and the Post War European Order (~1945).

Each of these settlements correspond to the defeat of the three Continentalist bids for unification that I examine: the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon’s Continental System, and the two German Reiche from 1871 to 1945 (Hitler I, II, & III respectively). And Kissinger’s three agreements instruct the behavior of Europe—a region which he calls, “the Pluralistic Order.”12

The pluralism ascribed to the European stage comes from Kissinger’s recognition that, historically, other settings have tended to have had only one great power that unifies a continental landmass through singular hegemony. He recognizes in contrast that “Europe has thrived on fragmentation and embraced its own divisions.”13

I’ll arrive at a critique of a notion embedded in his book, and it mostly pertains to the “balance of power” theory, which, in some cases, is not used as a descriptive term but comes with an air of prescriptive tonality. The theory can extend beyond theoretical value and be applied as an ideal, or as a policy—which Kissinger seems to herald. His model, however, mostly aligns with my own.

The main distinction worthy of note, for now, is that my 'Hitlers' are only used as a conceptual vehicle to help you “put your ecologist’s hat on,” i.e., to analyze state behavior in relation to their environment. The more specific aim is to invite my (probably attractive) reader to redraw the dividing line of interstate politics, and to analyze the world through the lens of Land and Sea.

The maritime vs continental dichotomy has amassed a vast body of literature with authors ranging from Thucydides to Carl Schmitt, and Foreign Affairs magazine even published an article on the matter as recent as 2025 (see S.C.M. Paine’s article here). In spite of this wide recognition, I still find the lens to be wildly underutilized.

To apply it, keep in mind that Europe stands out to Kissinger as being a case where no single dominant power has been strong enough to impose unity over a region. Instead of decisive hegemony, multiple great powers balanced against one another. Kissinger notes that the Roman Empire was the most recent unifying bid that had any staying power on the Continent. Only once since the fall of Rome has Europe achieved that level of universal rule that followed from the coronation of Charlemagne, but then only briefly as it was divided up after his succession.14 He continues by saying that, for “more than a thousand years, in the mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and identity from resistance to universal rule.”15

Kissinger’s use of “equilibrium” in the quote above, is used in reference to the balance of power theory which he describes as Europe’s “intricate mechanism tending toward a balance that preserved each people’s interests, integrity, and autonomy.”16 If you look at the map of Europe and see *land* distributed across borders of the various nation states, you may agree with Kissinger here, and assume that each of the borders are autonomous, and that they balance against one another in lieu of a Leviathan. Balance of power theorists may disagree with my more Hobbesian notion, and instead believe that order can be maintained in absence of a regional hegemon.

“Despite their many disagreements, nearly all balance of power theorists would accept the following set of interrelated propositions: (1) the prevention of others from achieving a position of hegemony in the system is a primary security goal of states; (2) threats of hegemony generate great-power balancing coalitions; and (3) as a result, sustained hegemonies rarely if ever form in multistate systems.”17

There is great descriptive value to this theory. As I argue, however, it is flawed. Arguing against balance of power theorists who align themselves with the views mentioned above, my minimalist claim is that maritime powers are far less likely to develop counterbalancing coalitions regardless of their status on the dominance hierarchy. To extend the range of that argument, I posit that there is, and often has been a regional hegemon in Europe; continuing by suggesting that a balance of power system, even with the implied absence of a hegemon in the region doesn’t explain periods of peace, and in fact, only when external regional hegemony has been challenged has there been total war; and finally, war has occurred due to the balance of power—not in spite of it.

Since roughly Louis XIV, if not Charles V, the balance has been tilted in the favor of the maritime powers, who in fact, employ the term “balance of power” as a prescriptive tool to further secure their own hegemony. This is where the Continental/Maritime aspect is especially enlightening. It’s found missing in World Order but will be applied to the book’s content here.

Crucially, due to their environment and lack of an Oceanic moat, Continentalists value land, and recognize it as the source of their power. The “Hitlers” described in my series are powers in the early-modern to modern era that were driving toward European unification, and doing so through Continental means—i.e., through hard power, mostly presenting itself through the annexation of land. However, it’s important to recognize that maritime and continental states have different sources of power; continentalists value land whereas sea powers find their source in wealth.18 This is deeply related to persistent maritime trade practices, which they protect with strong navies in due course, and where finally they create financial institutions in relation to their trade regulating power. Each trait feeds back into the other; once established, they’re all jointly causal.

Indeed, after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there was no hegemony to be found on the Continent itself, however, Europe still had a hegemon: the fiscal-naval state across the Channel. But that didn’t mean they “thrived on fragmentation” as Kissinger puts it—it only meant that they remained fragmented. The British Empire’s dominant role was taken up by their offspring following the Post War settlement, and then fully secured following the Cold War. However, Maritime empires like the U.S. and Great Britain, again, have a different source of power, and thus, its conquests do not resemble their Continental counterpart’s. The sea fairing states do not view power in terms of land—that is the realm of hard-power. Connoisseurs of soft-power that they are, they do not see power in those terms. Nevertheless, dominant influence persists and maritime powers have gone to great lengths to retain their hegemony.

The unification of Europe always posed the biggest threat to the British Empire, and the largest wars in their history have been fought to preclude Continental hegemony. In the Napoleonic context, this is because a united European continent would have in its possession more than enough resources for self sufficiency, which would (a) render the trade reliance Britain had developed obsolete; and along with that newly aggregated material, with extended open-water access, (b) the land dominance could be converted into naval supremacy—the central pillar that upheld Britain’s monopoly. A naval and/or trade rival had to be prevented because, as is the case for all maritime hegemons, the British were subject to the Competitive Exclusion Principle. Against the Hitlers, they obliged.

They mostly succeeded in maintaining Europe’s division, but they did lose another war across the Atlantic. It was fought against a rebellious, but ultimately infantile collection of colonies that mustn’t have appeared too threatening. However, within a century following their loss, Abraham Lincoln would fight hard to transform “these” United States into “the” United States. It is little surprise that the British supported the Southern Confederacy; as the U.S. has shown, an expansive, unified land-mass resembling the kind that Napoleon sought, would make it a small matter of time before the British were surpassed in the realm of maritime hegemony and territorial holdings alike. So why didn’t Europe unify? —a relevant question. It was the balance of power, that, on the one hand was descriptively applied by many, and on the other, prescriptively weaponized against the Continent to keep it “balanced” against one another, i.e., fractured.

Having brought up the U.S. in the last paragraph; few would question that it plays a hegemonic role today. Clearly then, hegemons can arise within their system—i.e., in their region, if not across the globe. But an “iron law” that balance of power theorists abide by suggests that “near hegemonic concentrations of power in the system nearly always trigger a counterbalancing coalition”19 . . . So, where is the United States' balancing coalition? We’ll keep waiting. But don’t get your hopes up, because a research paper published by International Security asked that very question, and found an answer in line with my own:

“Although great-power balancing coalitions often form against states amassing high concentrations of military power in autonomous continental systems, particularly in Europe, they generally do not form against states amassing high concentrations of naval power and wealth in the global maritime system. Predominant sea powers differ from dominant continental powers in their goals, strategies, and behavior, as well as in the responses they elicit from other leading states. Consequently the patterns of strategic interaction are fundamentally different in the two types of systems.”20

Like the ones before and after him, Hitler II was defeated by a balancing coalition. This time in the form of Austria, Russia, Prussia, and the British Empire—the latter would lead these efforts. Balancing coalitions are defined as a formal military alliance against a target state, and they would be employed when any state on the Continent gained a disproportionate level of power. This was often France due to its large population and its intermediate environment which can afford economic advantage from being a hybrid state that finds itself situated in the agriculturally prosperous South of Europe and the other half in the industrious North. The British viewed France accordingly as the French had always been the Continental power of chief concern in regard to European unification, and it faced the brunt of balancing coalitions subsidized by British finance, which then fueled petty national interests united against French rule. This was the case until the unification of Germany in 1871. The dynamic changed, and this was the real underpinning of the First World War that bled into a Second.

Insofar as ideological or (God-forbid) moral differences played a causal role in relation to the Napoleonic Wars or the World Wars, it was a secondary role—and as I would extend—a role that can be better understood with the Social Intuitionist’s approach; “moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgement has been reached.”21 <—The emphasis was my own. The judgement had been reached well before Hitler III, and yes, even before Hitler II. Stay tuned…

Prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church had a monopoly; they retained all shares in terms of potential believers in Western Europe. There was no free and open competition in this religious market, which means that it wasn’t a market at all. The Catholic monopoly bound the Holy Roman Empire, and following the Reformation, market competition ensued as it decayed the unifying belief that underpinned the European stage. The Empire lost its primary source of legitimacy as religious upstarts began their attempt at becoming the most appealing or the most rewarding in terms of ‘spiritual goods’ to incentivize growth.1

Of course, it’s an exaggeration to describe the Holy Roman Empire as a unified whole. The confederation was not utopic nor was it peacefully conjoined in Christendom. It may accurately be described as decentralized, but there was something resembling a stabilizing core to this fragmented imperial state, and it was represented by its political and spiritual leaders: The Empire and the Roman Catholic Church. Reciprocally, the faith provided legitimacy to the imperial state’s operating system, and the state ensured monopolistic privileges to the faith.2 Often this was done by force, the system was far from harmonic, but to varying degrees, it kept a large portion of Europe on the same page.

More importantly toward our end, is that the monopoly managed to keep the nearby maritime power on a distinctly continental leash. Note: the relatively secure, geographically separate English remained Catholic at the time of Martin Luther’s birth in 1483.

Now - we’re not concerning ourselves with English religious preferences, instead, I’ll translate what their Catholicism signifies for our purposes: England still sat inside the jurisdictional orbit of Rome, i.e., the latent maritime power conceded to a higher court across the English Channel, and were thus influenced by the continental power of the age. This would all begin to change within the lifespan of Luther, and the Brits would not become politically autonomous until they removed their Roman collar.

When they finally did, successive maritime powers would retain global influence and dominate their continental counterparts, as they’ve continued to do so ever since.

Crucially, maritime domination looks very different than it does in continental form. And this discussion lends to a broader thesis that is either directly or indirectly underwritten in everything in the text that follows. It will most certainly present as underwhelming unless you are an unusually excitable reader, but I submit it here only in its most digestible form for the time being: Maritime powers and continental powers have different strategic imperatives that, over time, select for different cultures, and institutions.

A more ambitious hypothesis, that frankly, should excite you (to the point of standing up, yelling at your screen and so on), is shorter in length, barely altered, but less likely to be widely accepted: Populations evolving from disparate environments have differing values.

In any case, all that is worthy of reflection (for now) is the rather basic and hardly original maritime-continental dichotomy. It was prefigured in Part III of the series, and it will be emphasized here, but due to my aversion to repetition, I’ve stolen a treatment from West Point’s Modern War Institute. How lazy!— I concede. But my thievery was also done, in part, to display the currency that this geographically inclined perspective holds among top American strategists and security elites.

“Continental powers emphasize territorial control, overland trade routes, and maintaining security through land-based military capabilities. They prefer to focus on immediate border threats and influencing the affairs of neighboring states to maintain border or territorial security. Continental powers traditionally utilize territorial conquest or overland trade to address national resource constraints. [. . .]

Although these states would acquire and often utilize naval forces, their primary imperative was territorial expansion for state security, creating a centralized economy, and a unified national culture. These priorities would often lead continental powers to govern through centralized governance to maintain territorial security and political rule. [. . .]

Maritime powers have unique strategic attributes making them distinctive from their continental counterparts. Where continental powers see territory to be taken, maritime powers see markets to facilitate cumulative economic growth. [. . .]

[M]aritime power identity, which is characterized by control of trade and trade routes, an emphasis on commerce, and more inclusive forms of government such as republics or constitutional monarchies. [. . .] Maritime power states evolved out of the periphery of early civilization, not at the center as great continental powers did, and thus had to rely on more open societies to enable trade and commerce to meet their resource needs.”3

Good. It now feels necessary to clarify two things before continuance: Firstly, the Roman Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V, the Pope, or any other symbol that represents a node of the continental Empire’s overlapping power structure, will be amalgamated into a single concept; the variate terms will then be used interchangeably for the remainder of this piece.

And again, Catholic authority provided a relatively centralized source of legitimacy for a fragmented imperial order. That legitimacy was continental in location and largely derived from theological sources. Because England still recognized that source of legitimacy, the continent retained leverage across the Channel. That is, until there was a transformation of power that occurred in proportion to the Reformation, which was most hastily adopted by the maritime powers.

Now—! We’re going to observe that 'transformation of power' in a unique way: We’re going to refer to the prior described concept represented by the Holy Roman Empire and Catholicism as “Hitler I.”—Why? Well don’t take this too seriously, but I am loosely recognizing the fact that Adolf Hitler served a similar role in terms of intent, as a continentalist. That intent being; a drive toward an expansive, continental, and European land mass that was knit together through conquest and some form of unified belief.

That too, I mean in a very specific way. There’s much more to this notion, and it will be explored at length in this post and others. But what I’ll preemptively dissuade my lovely reader from (hi), is a misleading proclivity to examine world historic phenomena through a left-vs-right lens. Almost in contradiction, that’s actually a lens I encourage you to use! Just not while ignoring the underlying dichotomies that make it “left” or “right” to begin with.

Among other things, the Reformation and Modernization series has largely been about intersections of interwoven contrast. To name a handful; Protestant vs Catholic, liberal vs conservative, free trade vs mercantilism, industrial vs agrarian, the nation state vs the imperial state, representative governments vs feudal-monarchies, and maritime vs continental orders. Such distinctions are what underpin the concept of modern vs pre-modern, and yes, to a large degree, left vs right as well.

Of course, it isn’t as “black and white” as that mere summary above describes, but for now we’re still only concerned with the internal components of modernity at their root. And to continue with that exploration.—

Whether or not “Hitler I” recognized the latent imperial potential inherent to the British Isles, Hitler II and III certainly did, as both Napoleon and Adolf respectively faced it in its actualized form. It’s worth noting that all Hitlers in this mildly-humorous schema failed to unite the continent (or large swaths of its territory) for any lasting period of time. Furthermore, the maritime powers with their Reformed undercurrents were able to subdue the continental forces with a progressive degree of ease relative to the advancement of time. This topic is expansive, and I begin with the latter, the most recent, and the most 'Hitler' of the three—we’ll reverse-engineer things from there.

It is, of course, very silly to consider Charles V as Hitler I, Napoleon as Hitler II, and Hitler as Hitler III. And it’s extra-silly, (if not just egregiously 'clickbait-y') to enumerate them and place Adolf himself as the third edition… Yes, yes, I know. But silliness aside, there is reality to this simplification that I intend to illustrate in the text and editions that follow.

If you recall, various components of the Holy Roman Empire were aggregated a bit earlier, and we transformed the notion into a simplifying representation of the whole. We’re now going to invert that process with Hitler III— we’ll disaggregate it, find out what it truly represents using one core component, then work backward until the shared motivations held by Hitler II (i.e., Napoleonic France) are ready to be adequately demonstrated. We’ll continue that process until arriving back where we started: the Reformation.

Lebensraum is the component I’ve chosen to extract from Hitler III, and it’s arguably causal in relation to the Second World War.6 The exploration of this component will not (and should not) be separated from an exploration of the causes of the First World War; the First cannot be separated from the Second. The best way to understand a war is often to understand the one that came prior, and symmetrically, the 20th century cannot be understood without the context of the 19th; the century will take almost the entirety of our attention in regard to Hitler III—who is, “himself,” first explored here through the vehicle of Lebensraum.

But there are two ways of thinking about Lebensraum: one from connotation and another from denotation. The former implies the policy-oriented, expansionistic aspirations of Germany during the World Wars—and this would be, an entirely accurate, but superficial implication that the word tends to relay. The lesser-known definition of Lebensraum leads us to an intriguing theory of biogeography and anthropogeographic development. This definition precedes National Socialism by several decades, and the context of its derivation finds roots nearer to the 1840s than the 1940s.

Somewhere between those dates is 1897-1901, when Friedrich Ratzel applied Darwin to civilizations, cultures, and the populations therein; he related them to their environment, and turned Darwin’s “the struggle for life” into “the struggle for space.” Darwin was translated, then introduced to Germany in the 1860s only a few months after his publication of The Origin of Species.7 As Darwin did, Ratzel recognized the environment as playing a decisive role in relation to the evolution of organic life, and it was from Darwinian principles he would develop Lebensraum to mean “the geographical surface area required to support a living species at its current population size and mode of existence. The exact boundaries of a species' Lebensraum were relative to its members' metabolic requirements and environment, and [their Lebensraum] expanded as population grew.”8

Regarding the quote above, the first half is clear-enough, but the latter demands emphasis: Ratzel describes the “metabolic requirements” of a group as rising in proportion to population growth, i.e., as there is an increase of the population, (and particularly, if a population increases while that population seeks to maintain an agrarian social-economic environment—which demands vast territory for sufficient farmland), so too will the need for more “living space” grow.

Ratzel was a scientist more so than an ideologue, his theories remain compelling in so far they rely on Darwinian architecture, and there’s even some scholarly Post-War debate on how much of the concept should be revived.9 Certainly, there are a few problems with Ratzelian Lebensraum that one may identify—and yeah, one of them is “-the War!” Yes grandpa, but what I’m getting at, is that emigrationist colonial ideology underpinned Ratzel’s science.10 Any conflation of any ideology and science tends to be sufficient cause to discredit even valid theories (supposedly), and I presume that this led to unfortunate foreign policy decision-making displayed in the Second World War.

More on that later, but what is emigrationist colonial ideology? Its adherents treated overseas settlement as a means to reduce domestic pressure; exporting surplus population while trying to preserve an agrarian national core abroad.11 In answering the question further, I’ll remind you that the late-19th/early-20th century was the high colonial era in which the maritime British Empire led as the dominant colonial power, and the British were followed by the French. Germany was behind in third, and were the last of the three to industrialize and to form a colonial empire. Germany’s actions from the 1840’s to the buildup of the First World War must be understood in the context of the desperate need to modernize. Within that dynamic, Germany had a population problem as well as many interrelated social problems. The latter of which expressed itself in Germany’s 1848 Revolution, but all concerns were descent from growth —an enormous component of the broader modernization study this series aims to provide.

Growth will be meant in three ways, but first only two: population growth and economic growth. Like many dyadic pairs reviewed in this series, they are a cause and consequence of each other. 'More people' are causal in relation to more labor and more demand; more output means more mouths can be fed and more children can survive to then go on and reproduce further. Within this chain of causality is another familiar piece of the 'modernity puzzle,' and it serves as a history-dividing catalyst: the Industrial Revolution that took place from roughly 1760 to 1840 accelerated the process by inducing more production while markedly lowering the costs of survival.

Among the political consequences downstream of the Industrial Revolution, few are more identifiable than those seen in the second half of the 19th century. German territories were reorganized by the accelerating process: rural life was displaced, urbanization became a means of containing the abundant new population, regional-class conflict intensified as owners of industrial capital economically outcompeted their agrarian counterparts, and legitimacy became fragile because the old agrarian order no longer held significant power in the new demographic and economic reality. This is the period in which Germany consolidated itself into a nation-state in 1871, and it is also the ecological context in which thinkers like Ratzel applied “growth” to a third variable: space. If a society seeks to remain substantially agrarian while its population rises, then land is seen as a metabolic requirement, and territorial expansion is then perceived as necessity.

Indeed, colonialist Germans like Ratzel saw land as a life-or-death necessity, and it was cohabited by a broad variety of other fears stemming from shifting market conditions and technological innovation.12 In regard to colonialism itself, it’s easy to moralize about it post hoc; to see it as pure greed or malicious conquest, but in the nineteenth century German environment it served as a management strategy: a strategy for externalizing domestic pressure, whether by securing raw materials and markets or by exporting surplus people (who were feared to be dispossessed revolutionaries, in many cases) into settlement frontiers13. Emigrationist colonialism is the conservative-agrarian version of the management strategy: it aimed at conservation of the threatened peasant class (who were often believed to be the basis of national identity14) by moving them somewhere else, rather than allowing for their dissolution by industrialization at home. Colonialism in the German case was not a cause of growth, but a management strategy thereof.

“Emigrationist colonialism and conservative agrarianism shared the same basic assumption: that excessive industrialization was socially and economically bad, that the proper basis of a stable and powerful German society was a traditional agricultural economy, and that correct foreign policy centered around opposition to, rather than cooperation with, the leading industrial power-Britain.”15 […]

The emigrationist theory prescribed overseas settlement colonies as the solution to a number of social problems, of which the most important was the Auswanderung, the massive nineteenth century emigration from Germany. Large numbers of Germans, displaced by economic and social changes in Germany, could settle as farmers in these colonies as an alternative to emigration to America or elsewhere. The settlement colonies would “protect” the emigrants’ culture, retain their contributions to the German economy, and recreate overseas the type of traditional peasant society which many regarded as the basis of national power and which was threatened by the process of industrialization.16

So Friedrich Ratzel was a member of this Emigrationist movement, promoted their strategies, and the post-1840s environment he lived in (having been born in 1844) influenced his theory of environments in relation to culture arising therefrom. Later, his work would be used as a motivating justification for Hitler III’s expanse, but for the early German state, emigrationist colonialism retained two utilities. The first was domestic as it gave Otto von Bismarck and conservative parties (of whom Ratzel was a member17) a vehicle for coalition building and for advancing non-liberal economic policies under a popular wing whenever it was necessary to gain broad middle-class support:

The appeal of emigrationist colonialism was recognized by Bismarck, the conservative parties, and the right-wing National Liberals, who sought a vehicle to forward non-liberal economic policies with popular support. Bismarck’s colonial policy, therefore, despite its substantive basis in the economic colonial theory, was partly occasioned by his desire to harness pro-colonial (emigrationist) middle-class opinion in order to push his general economic policy past left-liberal opposition and to achieve a consensus of the conservative and right-liberal parties with wide popular support. Such a consensus was possible on colonial issues primarily because of the prior existence of the emigrationist colonial ideology.18

The second utility relates to what is meant by “non-liberal” above: for reasons to be described, it will mean non-British for our purposes (anti-maritime works here too). But in addition to emigrationist colonial ideology was economic colonial ideology. This variety of colonialism was often, but not always at odds with the emigrationists. Generally, to an economic colonialist (a) industrialization was seen as inevitable, and (b) they were more willing to subordinate agricultural priorities to industrialize further, and increase export capacity.

So far I have only treated the social pressure behind emigrationist colonialism, but I should mention that economic colonialists were mostly disciples of the German economist Friedrich List, who recognized that the concept of free trade was ''coincidentally'' most advantageous to the very nation who invented and promoted it—i.e., Great Britain. Liberal trade is functionally equivalent to free trade, and free traders argue on behalf of lowering trade barriers like tariffs, which is an entirely unsurprising ideology to support for those with their interests tied to a maritime, inherently-trading Empire. Especially unsurprising and convenient if that Empire relied on protectionism until their own Industrial Revolution, and only then discouraged protectionist trade barriers for everyone else thereafter.

List, in fact, agreed that liberal/free trade may well be mutually beneficial to trading states, as the British economists prescribed, but only if the trade is between two industrialized, developed nations. Otherwise, a developing nation ''freely'' trades with a developed nation at the cost of leverage, i.e., the former becomes locked into a state of economic dependence with the industrial power, who will inevitably provide more substantive goods and have little to no reliance on the wellbeing of the non-industrial power. Promotional of the idea that states should use protectionism until national industrialization makes free trade viable, List developed what became known as the Infant Industry Argument in 1841, which was a response to disproportionate levels of industrialization, and the disproportionate trade advantaged to Great Britain relative to the rest of the world as a consequence.19 This disparity followed from the British-derived Industrial Revolution, the British-derived Adam Smith, and Smith’s British-derived theory of international trade; all of which were promoted as universal moral goods; all of which lent to economic leverage granted to Great Brit— you get the idea..

There’s much more to be said on Listian thought, but it’s beyond the scope of this article. I would highly recommend this for those interested, but for now: economic colonialists were German nationalists favoring industrialization; the national economy was valued over international free trade—which they saw as dependence on British imports; they were comfortable with the cost of tariffs, saw it as a future investment in an industrialized Germany, and they were willing to forego the cheap British goods on offer to support their own nation’s economy in its stead.

German colonial projects in either their emigrationist or economic form, can be viewed as a way to reduce dependence on a maritime world economy that was disproportionately shaped by Britain. Britain, along with France were Germany’s primary rivals from 1871-1945; from Germany’s consolidation until the Second World War, the British possessed the maritime environment that Germany’s modernization processes and outcomes had to survive within. As German leaders understood from Bismarck onward, continental industrial power can grow to hegemonic status, but they must do so through (a) the build-up of enough naval-power to control inputs and trade routes, or, (b) secure enough territory (in terms of land-mass) to the extent that it no longer remains reliant on external goods or the maritime-controlled trade thereof.

But the latter option would have entailed an expansion into other great-powers; there were few powers to invade that wouldn’t incite a great-power war as Germany bordered the French at one end and Russia at the other from 1870-1914; meanwhile France and Russia were (rightfully) assumed to ally in such a war, making German defeat all but certain at any time from the consolidation of Germany to at least 1903—when Germany became the dominant industrial power of Europe, and even then, such a war’s victory would be enormously questionable, British involvement notwithstanding.20 Nevertheless, as they felt it was a necessity, Germany opted to challenge the great powers, but only from afar by establishing overseas colonies, furthering industrial might, and slowly building up maritime means to eventually get to their security-induced ends by challenging the British position as a regional hegemon. As described, the state harnessed domestic support from urban economic, and rural emigrationist blocs to its convenience; code-switching between pro-industrialist and pro-agriculturalist arguments alike, they were all to unite under the common aim of territorial expanse as a means of preserving national autonomy. Ratzel served a role in this wider project as his science could be latched onto by colonialists of any variety needing of a legitimizing theory to back territorial growth.

With this context the German strategy of Weltpolitik is intelligible. In essence, it was a bid to make Germany’s position abroad “commensurate with her new industrial might;” a deliberate shift away from Bismarckian caution and toward a more flamboyant global posture.21 As you can imagine, the thalassocracy of Great Britain didn’t make Germany very confident in the long-term prospects of their overseas colonial holdings acquired in the 1880s. And absent reliable overseas space, German leaders increasingly looked to a continental solution- which would later arrive in the form of Ober Ost and the Generalplan Ost in WWI and II respectively. But industrial dominance wasn’t going to be enough to get them there; continental nations cannot become a global power in a world connected by sea lanes without either joining the sea lane system on terms acceptable to its custodian, or building the coercive tools to renegotiate those terms.

That renegotiation attempt is why the naval program began. Germany’s battleship building “opened the door to the Anglo German naval race,” with the Navy Bills of 1898 and 1900 laying out “a massive naval expansion under anti British auspices,” aiming at a 2:3 capital ship ratio so the German fleet would have a credible chance in a defensive war in the North Sea.22 Short of hegemonic naval capacity, a fleet that could inflict unacceptable damage could still coerce Britain into accepting German equality as a global empire.

Britain’s response, which was entirely predictable, was to not accept the continental rival threatening their position. A maritime hegemon cannot afford a peer competitor in the one domain that gives it power vis-à-vis the continent. Naturally it will do anything it can to defend its status on the world stage, which is why In 1905 the British intelligence department began planning for a naval blockade of the continent, as economic warfare had always their staple; from the blockade, “between 478,500 and 800,000 civilians died from diseases related to hunger and malnutrition.”23 But not before 1908, when the British construction and war planning increasingly shifted its attention toward the battleships rising across the North Sea.24

And with the naval buildup mentioned between the British and German rivals… I trust you know where the story goes, but I will be happy to return to the subjects of the First and Second World War before long. For now, I’ve gone on quite long about only a small component of the more ambitious project I intend to display. This piece has mainly gotten at three concentric circles of an interconnected idea: the outermost shell is the broader, series-defining exploration of modernity at its roots. The next, more specific subject was the establishment of “three Hitlers” representative of continental powers that are characterologically expansionistic, centralized, and they seek to restrain or to oppose Maritime hegemony—and this was done to emphasize the point that geographic environments predispose nations to adopt characteristic values based on a common set of survival strategies. Relatedly, finally, and most specifically, this piece has told the story of Lebensraum’s invention by Friedrich Ratzel, who I will now conclude with.

Like everyone else, Ratzel developed his views as a product of things that came before him. For Ratzel, like most in the 19th century, what structured his worldview was the division of history; the undoing of the social-political order that evolved as a consequence of the Agricultural Revolution, then being undone by the Industrial Revolution, as it introduced a new social-political order in it’s post-1840 aftermath. Ratzel was born in 1844, and it was within this ecological environment that Lebensraum would be developed, and from where it would be mimetically selected for by Hitler III, just prior its transmission being largely punished by extinction.

And with the imperative of expanding agricultural space, Hitler III would go on to treat the description offered by Ratzel as a prescription to invade the agrarian “breadbasket” of Europe, and this happened to be in the possession of the USSR in 1941. The incitement of a two-front war would be the beginning of the end for both the connotation, and the denotation of Lebensraum. With British possession of the seas, then wedged between two continental great powers, the German environment has never been generous... As John Mearsheimer describes, “Security was always a burning issue for Germany because of geography: it is located in the center of Europe with few natural defensive barriers on either its eastern or western flank, which makes it vulnerable to invasion. Consequently, German leaders were always on the lookout for opportunities to gain power and enhance the prospects for their country’s survival.”25 But, on some level, would that geographic reality in relation to the World Wars’ conclusion not support the very ideas behind Lebensraum to begin with? In observance of human affairs through an ecological and evolutionary lens, it’s as though the failure of Lebensraum as a political project, itself confirms validity of the theory in it’s originary, geographically inclined form: the environment matters.

Ironically, I couldn’t help but notice while researching Friedrich Ratzel the frequency with which authors would at once reject Ratzelian Lebensraum due to it’s reputation, and would then go on to explain precisely how it was shaped and transmitted through the.. historical-social-cultural-political-geographic-technological-genetic-etc. environment (and this was always mentioned, if not directly, then by default). Lebensraum, as a theory or otherwise, was shaped by its own founding principles, or at least addressed the geographic composite of the broader umbrella implied by the word “environment.” So perhaps, to a degree, the denotation of Lebensraum had to destroy its own connotation to confirm itself.

But I wont get too carried away: Ratzel has been described as a “spatial determinist,” and my broader, evolutionary-ecological approach to human affairs considers more factors than merely location. As a final note; if Friedrich Ratzel could have seen what his theory of Lebensraum ended up doing to his own living space at the end of the War, I doubt he would have published any work on the subject, and perhaps no work at all. Who knows. To the extent that its own undoing implies a form of confirmation, and perhaps led to some improved-upon modification, it would be an almost Greek tragedy-esque Aufheben of a story. And its telling can’t be done without the context of the Industrial Revolution of 1760-1840.., but subsumed within that period, there is another Revolution to be addressed; it began in 1789 and it culminated in 1815 following the defeat of Hitler II at Waterloo. Until next time… Ciao.

There are indeed some periods of history that are of greater significance than others in terms of altering it with permanence, and more deeply affecting the course of events that followed.

Having recognized the potential bias I may have, I nevertheless believe that we are living through such a period, one in which we are subject to drastic, life-altering, environmental shifts causing the structure of human life to change at a dangerous rate. And it’s an era from which we may never return to “how things were” (-however that quote may be interpreted).

Of course, there is never a possibility of a return to normalcy, as there is evidently no such norm to be found. Environments and species are always changing, and those facts presuppose a relative flux in behavior of the species within that environment- as any ecologist will know.

Excessively tumultuous periods of history entail an environmental rate of change so rapid, that adaptation can barely keep up with the structural alterations underway. When I suggest that we are in such a period, I should clarify; I'm not really talking about climate change or any supposed crisis of the sort. When I say “environment,” yes, I also mean climate and trees and everything green that you may expect to read about in your introductory college bio textbook. However, such features of our environment are no longer as relevant to the induced necessity to adapt.

Of far greater concern than the effects of man-made technology, is man-made technology itself—for this too is your environment. A beaver’s dam is the beaver’s environment, and so too is the internet yours. That it doesn’t feel natural, makes no difference to the structural, selection effects it will have on you, dear reader. And when the rate of change in the environment is dangerously high, we’ll henceforth refer to such periods as ‘transitional periods.’ (Wow, so creative.)

Not always, but often transitional periods are marked by the word “revolution.” Two revolutions of particular significance (and likely the two that are most significant) are of course, the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. These events permanently altered the technological, dietary, social, political, and economic structures (i.e., the environment) of human life; and as a result, they altered the biological (i.e., evolutionary, i.e., genetic) trajectory thereof.

As of 2026, the time of this writing, if we examine the past 30 years, we have undergone the democratization of internet access, the invention of the iPhone, now LLMs, and a bunch of appendaged nonsense in between (e.g., tik tok, e.g., pornography… e.g., tik-tok-pornography.. and like, a million other utterly novel things). I believe this to be a transitional period of equivalent significance to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution—which you’ll recognize to be quite a substantial claim if you’re familiar with the consequences of either.

I’ll use the Agricultural Revolution (AR) as an example, and I’ll limit the scope of wide-ranging effects to politics alone: the political consequences of the AR were not slight... Pre-AR was pre-politics. Nomads stopped “nomad-ing,” settled on fertile soil to start farming <—duh. Being in a single location as opposed to many, means that you have to live with a group on a piece of land. When you have to live with people in immobile permanence, you’ll probably want to start making some rules- we’ll call those laws. But what good are those if there’s no one to enforce them? Not very good at all, so proto-police can handle internal defense. What about external defense? Arable land is valuable and finite capital, so you’ll have to protect your territory with things like borders, and things resembling a military. You’ll probably want to have a leader, who is probably going to be the land owner. If you’re the land owner, you’re probably going to want to induce the lesser ones to go collect your carrots, and then give them something like, a piece of wheat in return—oh look there’s money, and O—an economy, that’s new too. Amalgamate all of that and you’ll get the definition, and thus the invention of politics. “Transitional periods” may not be creatively named, but they’re seen as significant for clear-enough reasons; they change everything, and they do so with permanence.

Industrialization is deserving of a full and separate treatment in a forthcoming piece, as we are now living through the concluding act of its long “new normal.” The technological acceleration we’ve seen from the ~1990s-2026 was, of course, a consequence of the industrial revolution(s) from 1760 to 1914. “The industrial revolution and it’s consequences” continue to reduce the Agricultural “norms” unto obsolescence. Just as the Agricultural Revolution instantiated an acute Aufheben of nomadic life, and just as the Industrial Revolution made agricultural values “old-world,” so too will our current Revolution nullify anything that your ageing parents think is normal.

To remain on the subject of political consequences of transitional periods, I’d like to point out that the post-industrial responses to politics generated three leading theories: Representative Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. These were all valid responses to the Industrial Revolution. It’s easy to condemn any of them in hindsight, but I will not be engaging in criticism of any of the three. From an ecological perspective, it is understandable to scramble for (economic/political/etc.) solutions to an environmental shift that so drastically relegated the feudal-monarchical environment into irrelevancy. With that said, I believe the shift we are currently undergoing has symmetrically made irrelevant the concepts of Democracy, Communism, and Fascism —it has rendered them obsolete, or fundamentally altered them in kind, if not in name. For better or worse, what’s coming will be something fundamentally new. From this lens, the chaos of the news-cycle seems appropriate and expected.

Parliamentarism had won and Royalism had lost; Protestantism had won and England would never again have a Catholic monarch. The Crown would never again be sovereign vis-à-vis the Houses of Parliament. And though the terminology wouldn’t be invented for another century (then wouldn’t be popularized for several centuries thereafter) indeed this was a “left-vs-right” dispute, and one which had a clear winner.

Proportionate to Parliament’s relative share of power rising, England begins to become the first modern state, going on to check all of the boxes qualified by any standard definition of “modernized.” It’s a gradual process, of course, but one that finds a most recognizable point of origin. And to remind you, we are here to examine the origins of each component of modern life, and so a definition proves helpful in this respect. Two were provided in Part IV, but here’s something looser, and more targeted toward our end:

“Modernity,” “the modern world,” and “modernization,” are roughly interchangeable when used for the purposes of this series, and while it adequately represents our era, it is better understood as a system, rather than a period of time.

And embedded within the concept of “modernity” are a number of emblematic characteristics and pivotal events. Each of which has either determinately influenced the modern world’s trajectory or remains as a crucial structural element of modern life. Each characteristic is co-constitutive with modernization; and each can be thought of as a pillar upon which the modern world rests.

But what are those components? I will here provide a sample of five that hold particular significance:

• Capitalism (market economies, more broadly)

• Globalism (i.e., economic interdependence and international integration)

• Industrialism (which is now in a post-Industrial, immaterial stage)

• Liberalism (or representative forms of government)

• The Modern Financial System (i.e., the accommodative central bank reserve system)

Preclude one of these components from development, and “modernity” becomes unrecognizable; it may retain the same label, but would be something else entirely. That’s because all features are more-or-less interdependent, all coevolved, all descend from a common ancestor, and all will be the subjects of the following post which indirectly targets each. In doing this, we’re gonna touch on like, a million “revolutions”... And I’m being dramatic, but we’re gonna arrive at the French and Industrial Revolution, and have already touched on the Glorious. Now onto it’s near-immediate aftermath—>

I. The Financial Revolution

Confusingly, there’s several different names for the 1688 revolution that was described at the outset. I tend to go with “the Glorious Revolution,” because that’s the one I’ve most frequently heard. But another name for it is “the Bloodless Revolution,” which I like because it’s a lie; it was quite bloody, making the name mildly humorous. Anyway, if that one was bloodless, the Financial Revolution is really bloody in contrast. Which is not obvious! But the Financial Revolution is the cause and consequence of many wars to be described, and I’ll begin bridging the Glorious-&-Financial Revolution by emphasizing that William III was a Dutch Prince. And to remind you, it is the Dutch Prince William III who Parliament invited to replace James on the Throne.

But the thing about Dutch Princes is that they tend to have particularly Dutch interests as any Dutchman would. And surrounding the Revolution in 1688, the Dutch had a continental dispute with the French. William’s promotion alongside England’s natural proclivity toward maritime hegemony, makes what followed from the Bloodless Revolution of little surprise:

“In May 1689, Parliament declared war on France, following the wishes of the new King, William III. For the next 25 years, with only one truce of five years, England was engaged in a long and expensive war with its neighbor across the Channel.”1

I’ll emphasize three things from UK Parliament’s quote here: (1) Parliament declared war on France, not the Crown, which now possessed a smaller share of power. (2) This war continued for roughly 25 years. And most importantly, (3) this war was expensive.

“At the end of this war it [England] emerged as the leading European power - and Parliament more powerful than before because of its increased control over the Crown’s finances.”2

This is where I’ll point out that the modernization of the financial system, as you’ll see, coevolves alongside sovereignty shifting from a monarchical center to institutional peripheries. And both factors, i.e., financial and political modernization correlate with a relative incrementation in frequency and intensity of warfare. Which is where I’m grounding our discussion of the Financial Revolution— in war.

But war alone does not explain what followed. Of concern is the ways in which the state was reorganized by war. The Financial Revolution was a structural transformation of power, and how power was financed, administered, and legitimized. The financial institutions built as a response to war would go on to contribute directly to the buildup of state capacity. Or as one scholar puts it, there was-

“positive joint causality between warfare and the expansion of both state capacity and financial intermediation.”3

The “financial intermediation” aspect marks a decisive break from the pre-modern world to be discussed throughout the remainder of this post. State-building depends fundamentally on the government’s ability to collect taxes, and it is considerably easier to collect them in money than in kind.4 We’ll observe a shift toward a monetized economy that becomes inseparable from the rise of the modern state. And crucially, this process was enabled by representative government itself.5 Once sovereignty was vested in Parliament, public debt could be reconceived not as a personal liability of a monarch, but as the collective obligation of citizens. In that sense, government borrowing became politically viable precisely because it was no longer royal, but national. But more on that later… For now:

From 1689 to 1815 the English were in a declared state of war for over 50% of that time.6 As mentioned, war is expensive and something like, “Where did the Brits get the money for this?” might be a good question to ask. And the answer is, they didn’t have the money for it at all.

The modernization of war from 1688 onward became inseparable from the modernization of finance. War expenditures increased, but they also transformed in kind, demanding forms of capital that no longer existed as material coins or bullion. That is, modern wars could no longer be fought with the pre-modern, finite quantities of gold and silver, but with credit. And this all begins with “King William’s War,” the Nine Years' War described prior. We’ll see it ultimately gave rise to the bond and stock market as necessary financial instruments, but I’ll start that exploration by comparing the protype method of securing what has been called, the major sources of state revenue: 1. Taxes and 2. Loans (i.e., Debt).7

In the pre-modern age, a private subject of the king would travel on foot or by horse to a neighboring village. His intention being, to estimate what commodities its residents might have, levy an indirect tax on a select few goods, and take the loot back to… wherever it was that accorded with the Crown’s demands. This form of fiscal revenue acquisition was called tax farming. It was an arduous and imprecise process, often entailing embezzlement and scarcely yielding consistent results. I’ve simplified things, it can be read about more here, but roughly speaking, this was the way in which England levied taxes for most of the 17th century.8

As you might imagine, this was not very lucrative for the state… As it turns out, it was not very lucrative for the tax-farmer either… O—don’t feel bad about him though. Being a tax-farmer was actually an entirely voluntary position. And to make this odd vocation even more foreign; it was the tax-farmer who paid the king to secure his position. And yes, yes, there’s actually a very good reason for him doing this, but the key thing to know for now is that tax farming served two familiar roles to the state: (1) tax revenue and (2) debt.

So the tax-farmer collected taxes—duh. But what about the debt part? And why did he pay to be employed as a tax farmer? The answer to both questions are the same: He paid for this role because he got to keep whatever money was collected in excess of the King’s imposed levy (which the tax farmer presumed to be more than the down-payment given to the king at the outset). Did the tax farmer know this would be lucrative? He didn’t! But it worked out frequently-enough, I guess. He was a speculator, and a prototype lender who is doing the pre-modern equivalent of a citizen paying for a bond. And the King was okay with him taking excess payments—why? For the same reason the U.S. is okay with paying interest on bonds; to receive more cash now, at the expense of interest on debt to be paid later. King’s would recruit tax farmers when they needed liquid “cash” which was provided by the tax farmer’s down-payment.9 The excess to be lost could be worried about later. As for now, the king needed to pay for jewels and harlots, or whatever it was that kings liked to buy.

“That’s all well and good, but what does this have to do with the transformation into modernity?”—would be a fair response. But worthy of emphasis, is that the tax farming system was not very lucrative, and the king knew this. Simply, taxes were not expected to be a decisively generative source of state revenue for pre-modern states. But all states need revenue, and in noting that there was no income tax at this time, I’ll also emphasize that monarchical revenue most often came from external sources. Internal sources like taxes were inconstant, only imposed based on temporary necessity, and only ever limited to things like customs (i.e., duties on international, not domestic trade), excises (i.e., domestic taxes on particular goods such as alcohol and tobacco), and the occasional land-tax, for those fortunate enough to own any.10

Why did they need to super-charge their fiscal capacity? Because of the substantive debt incurred during the Nine Years War and subsequent War of Spanish Succession; the same wars that I mentioned earlier, having been declared by Parliament and brought about under the new (and notably Dutch) King William III.

How did they raise their fiscal capacity? England gradually dismantled the private and inadequate tax-farming system, then replaced it with a centralized, state-regulated apparatus of tax collection. This new fiscal institution employed far more tax collectors, improved the flow of receipts, and introduced increasingly sophisticated methods of record-keeping and calculation. These administrative advances allowed taxation to expand incrementally over the war-ridden eighteenth century without collapsing under political or logistical strain. Although indirect taxes remained the primary source of state revenue, the decisive change after 1688 was the dramatic increase in fiscal capacity —and it only accelerated in the decades that followed.11

Furthermore, the Bill of Rights created in 1689 precluded the King’s power of levying taxes, codifying Parliamentary control thereof. And the tax revenue would no longer be directed by tax farmers toward the King’s purse. Rather, the Exchequer would be the final destination of all receipts, and it was to be collected by state employed bureaucracy—the aforementioned apparatus. From there, the Treasury would oversee taxes, public funds, and the creation of annual budgets, not the King.

As to “why” this had to happen is the increase in interstate conflict. As to “how,” well we’ve touched on the expansion of the tax apparatus already, but there is another reason …But before we get to it, take a gander at this graph representing the ascent of England’s fiscal capacity from 1500-1850 in real terms. Note that it’s essentially stagnant throughout the “tax-farm era,” and remains so until about 1688.

Now, onto the other thing. This one is more interesting and of far greater significance than the taxation component of revenue. Remember 1. and 2.? Taxes and Debt.

Loans are an interchangeable word for debt, and Deficit financing is the more accurate term I’m getting at here: Debt can be remembered by three C’s, as it can be defensibly argued that it’s the primary cause, consequence, and constant of the British empire built from the period 1688-1815. So too does debt remain represented by those same “three C’s” in all modern hegemons, as my fellow American readers might attest. But for now we are only concerned with it’s origin in early-modern England. And here I wish to draw your attention toward debt’s propensity to act as a source of power, not simply as a cost of power.

Theoretically, monarchs could levy taxes, and in addition they could take more money from their subjects whenever they really really needed to. But representative democracies (or proto-representative democracies, in this case) have to do something way more subtle when they need more money, lest they face electoral consequences or loss of legitimacy. Parliamentary England needed their wealthier citizens to give up loot voluntarily- how? They sell government-backed securities (i.e., bonds, bills, etc.) to speculators who pay [X price], and speculators want to do this because they’re promised to be paid back [X price]+[interest]. But citizens will only be creditors if they believe that the state is both capable and willing to consistently pay off the debt. This requires trust.

How does a government acquire that trust? Well, there’s a few ways. For one; remember how the Brits rose their fiscal capacity? Remember the second graph? Smarty pants, I knew you would (: …Anyway, the consistent incrementation of taxes signaled to lenders that the state would be able to pay back the debt, lending to enhanced confidence of creditors.

BUT—! There’s actually another way that offers itself up for display quite nicely, and it relates to a profoundly important component of this narrative that has hitherto gone unmentioned. I’ll introduce it by quoting, that “no other institution contributed more to the stability of the [Glorious] revolution settlement.”12 I’ve delayed this long enough: The institution referred to is the Bank of England, which was chartered by Parliament in 1694, and it would become the prototype of most modern central banks today.13

Though, it wouldn’t officially be nationalized as a central bank until 1946.14 Instead, the Bank was chartered under the Tonnage Act as a private joint-stock company, only implicitly tied to the state rather than formally incorporated into it. That it was private and not technically public, is an answer to the question that opened the last paragraph: this “private” status helps explain the trust it quickly commanded among creditors. The Bank operated as a legally distinct intermediary between Parliament and investors, so public borrowing was no longer seen as a direct extension of state discretion. Instead, it was mediated through a corporate body with what was perceived to be enforceable contracts, predictable interest payments, and dedicated tax revenues. So paradoxically, it was precisely the Bank’s private character that enhanced the credibility of public finance15. But this notably private institution was chartered with the stated intent as follows:

for secureing certaine Recompenses and Advantages in the said Act mentioned to such Persons as shall voluntarily advance the summe of [£1,500,000] towards the carrying on the Warr against France.16

So it was chartered to continue the war with France, and it would be used for this purpose for the following century until 1815. In this case, the Nine Years’ War was the precipitating cause. I should further emphasize that before 1688, England was not a world power. In 1788, however, Britain was the world power, and it was one built on debt. Debt = Good?? You tell me. Read this passage by historian John Brewer on the state’s ascent from 1688-1783:

“From its modest beginnings as a peripheral power—a minor, infrequent almost inconsequential participant in the great wars that ravaged sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe—Britain emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the military Wunderkind of the age. Dutch admirals learnt to fear and then admire its navies, French generals reluctantly conferred respect on its officers and men, and Spanish governors trembled for the safety of their colonies and the sanctity of their trade. European armies, most notably those of Austria, Prussia and the minor German states, marched if not to the beat of British drums then to the colour of English money. Under the early Stuarts England had cut a puny military figure; by the reign of George III Britain had become one of the heaviest weights in the balance of power in Europe. She had also acquired an empire of ample proportions and prodigious wealth. New England merchants, Southern planters, Caribbean slaves and Indian sepoys were subject to her authority. No sea was safe from British traders; even the Pacific and the Orient were beginning to feel the British presence. Thornhill’s Painted Hall at the Naval Hospital at Greenwich (1717–25), with its extravagant depiction of Britain’s military power, contained its share of wish fulfilment, but the allegorical presence of the four continents was not misleading: Britain was on the threshold of becoming a transcontinental power.”17

Yes, yes, the glaze is unreal… But it’s not inaccurate. Now compare the British ascent to a graph representing the incrementation of their public debt during the long 18th century:

But more debt is bad right? Apparently not, because receiving voluntary loans from wealthy citizens and private speculators would enable the modern state to spend beyond its own means, and more crucially, to spend what their pre-modern enemies could yet afford. Now let’s compare the state’s debt to the relative cost of debt once inflation could be used as a tool to lower the real price that was owed:

In the coming post I intend to show that the Bank of England would go on to play a causal role not only in Britain’s industrial development, but also in the geopolitical struggles that culminated in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution are often treated as the origins of the modern state. Without diminishing their significance, I argue that both were downstream consequences of a path already set in motion by the Glorious Revolution and its financial aftermath.

And finally, the modern nation-state was not necessarily developed due to representative government, nor was it necessarily made by the transmutation of subjects into citizens, nor the contrived fantasy of “rights” bestowed, nor industrialization, nor was it any such consequence of the real cause: The monetary economy became a financial economy- from which everyone was more easily taxed. Yes! That is speculative provocation this post will close on; it seems to be taxation, i.e., the ability for the state to reliably generate revenue that led to the modern nation-state. Each factor that tends to follow from this, private property, bureaucracy, citizenship, all of it is functionally equivalent to easing the ability of the state to collect taxes.

More specifically, the convergence-point between the Reformation and modernity was the continental vs maritime showdown between France and Great Britain from 1793-1815.

Most specifically, it was 1815. As was described in the the last post, the British defeat of Napoleon yielded uncontested naval, trade, and financial dominance across the world. It would produce the first global empire, and with it came global influence, such that the Anglos were able to define “modernization” itself. They got to decide what the word meant, and then use it as a metric to scale how similar other societies were to themselves—true power.

To a notable nineteenth century German, the English were a loathsome race. Not because they lacked a “will to power” (which they so clearly had) but due to them not wanting to have it. To Friedrich Nietzsche, an artist, they were too utilitarian, too universalistic, too scientific, too Christian, and too moral. And to a self-proclaimed Dionysian like Nietzsche, and one who was skeptical of morality itself, British global hegemony was seen as carrying great risk. He understood that the expansionistic conversion project that so defines the spread of Christianity, was now driving a distinctly British vehicle.2

Regarding the BQ (the British question) Nietzsche was primarily concerned with philosophy becoming nothing deeper than a science of morality.3 Rejecting the idea of Plato’s absolute Good, he didn’t believe the British knew what was “right” or “wrong” for society, and doubted the extent to which those concepts existed at all. If they did, was universalizing “the good” even an admirable goal? That too was dubious.4

What he could observe however, was the universalistic, flattening, and morality-imposing attributes embedded in all of his critiques aimed at the project of Christianity, and the Colonial British empire alike.5 As I see it, these characteristics are indeed causative in the Empire’s ultimate collapse.

But in contradiction, the very same traits that Nietzsche was so presciently averse to, were also the source of British power at an earlier stage of their history. Through the excuse of “Christianizing” the world, then “civilizing” the world, and finally “modernizing” the world, the Brits had enabled themselves to conquer with moral justification6. Their morality became the world’s morality, enforced first through tangible means, and then backed by moral codes (e.g., contrived fantasy such as “international law”)7. More crucial than the colonial “hard power” is what remained; a particularly moralistic strain of soft power.

Regarding the quote above, and reflecting on the eventual collapse of the Empire, the English seem to have done both; first justifying great and terrible successes, then tranquilizing themselves into abject submission on the world stage. First in the long 19th century, then in the long 20th—first in power, then in self-induced defeat—first as tragedy, then as farce, and so on...

Anyway, we will move on from this discussion of the English character (for now), but I wanted to prefigure some things to come: Firstly, I want this dialectical behavior of “modernity” kept in mind; there is an inversive pattern here that can be recognized when the principles that make a historical movement successful, become the very same that lead to its demise. An example of that pattern can be observed in my addendum to Part I here. That concept will reemerge (most significantly in the concluding piece of this limited series). And the final thing to keep in mind is this:

To discuss the British is to discuss modernization. It then feels necessary to define what is meant by modernization, as it means something rather specific. I will provide this according to a founder of modernization theory, Talcott Parsons. Parsons defines it according to six characteristics: A society is modernized if it has recognizable preferences for (1) individualism over collectivism, (2) secular science over religion and mythology, (3) having specialized divisions of labor, (4) not having dominance hierarchies rooted in heredity, (5) having industrial economies more prominent than agricultural ones, (6) and being universalistic, more so than particularistic.9

And here’s a simpler definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which emphasizes the industrialization aspect by restating one idea in like seven different ways repeatedly:

Which is funny—but it’s not wrong. So let’s keep that in mind for the next post; Industrial Society = Modern Society.10 Again, almost every systemic innovation that could be most proximately associated with “the modern world” finds provenance in the English, including the industrial revolution. Note that the first industrial revolution was British and is considered to have occurred from the years 1760-1840.

As established in Part III, 1815 is the center of our historical narrative—but we can then “zoom out” a bit and find a broader range of centrality. What do I mean by that? I mean to say that 1815 is the most central of centers, but it remains embedded in layers. Waterloo (1815) marks the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), but that war itself was contained within the industrial revolution (1760-1840), and both of which are subsumed in the financial revolution (1688-). The significance of each layer cannot be understated, all are a cascade of dependent phenomena, all are British phenomena, all of it builds into modernization, and all of it will be among the topics considered in my forthcoming post.

While 1815 marks the beginning of the British empire, 1688 marks the beginning of Britain as a state—a quintessentially modern state, and a state that was made by money, enabling it to finance military campaigns designed to preclude the emergence of a continental hegemon11. France in this case. Germany in another…

The intention behind my exploratory analyses is to observe the origins of modernity through the lens of a theoretical model that positions the Reformation as the root source. That is only one framework (of many) that can provide a narrative schema to help integrate one’s understanding. Modernity is something worthy of comprehensive study, because it comes with many great and terrible things that we do not know how to handle. Such things can be better managed when they are first identified.

With that, I will restate that modern market economies are individualized economies. To be clear:

A market economy is an economic system in which individuals and firms exchange goods and services in a largely unfettered manner. To most people, this seems like a natural state of affairs, but until fairly recently, it was the exception, not the norm. In many preindustrial societies, people subsisted on the fruits of their own labor and engaged in very limited trade. In feudal Europe, most people were legally bound to a particular lord and manor and could not exchange their labor for a wage anywhere they pleased. The creation of the modern market economy required that feudal bonds restricting labor be broken so that most people would become dependent on market exchanges. In modern industrial and postindustrial societies, virtually the entire population depends on earning a wage or receiving a share of profit via the market.1

With the demise of the mercantilist era and emergence of market economies, we again locate a modernized social structure that was transformed through decentralization.

Reframing the orientation of cultural systems from collectivistic to individualistic is the key characteristic to note when relating modernized social structures to their Reformed root. The Reformation is to be treated as an era that influenced this transformational cascade which follows a characteristic pattern: It expresses itself through supplanting a stabilizing center, removing representatives of collective interest, then relegating that interest to the self.

Part I mentions the Reformed motivation to develop a “personal relationship with God,” obviating the Church as an intermediary. Symmetrically, market economies take the shape of a personal relationship with economic consumption, in the place of state-oriented mercantilism. I will emphasize that this economic transformation is a decidedly crucial one in relation to our end-point of modernization.

Once authority is decentralized in the religious sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain centralized coordination in the economic sphere. The mercantilist state, whose coherence depended on an undivided sovereign directing national wealth toward national strength, was incompatible with a culture that had already been taught to think and act through the individual.

The observance of that change will first demand attention be directed toward the great power conflict it was subsumed in, which ultimately lead to globalization.

In 1990 following the then inevitable fall of the Soviet Union, Charles Krauthammer published an infamous paper entitled The Unipolar Moment.

The collapse of America’s one and only peer-competitor came with many faulty assumptions rooted in optimism (see Fukuyama 1992), But Krauthammer's wasn't one of them. Indeed, it was a unipolar moment yielding uncontested U.S. hegemony for (at least) the following 35 years. The Americans had won The Long American Century—the name of which, really should have given it away.

And I’ll conclude that decoy by pointing out that the fall of the Soviet Union was not the first unipolar moment. In 1815 following their victory against Napoleon, the British Empire was left with no serious rival. And not only was this true on the European stage, but no nation on earth could provide adequate challenge vis-à-vis the English.

Preceding their American offspring by almost two centuries, the British had removed their most significant rival, and their sea-power was left uncontested to birth the Pax Britannica. This God-like power disparity afforded ample opportunity to restructure the world in their own image, which is precisely what they did. But how did they do it?

For the two previous centuries Great Britain and France had been in a declared state of war for over 50% of that time,2 and it was the conflictual dialectic between them that induced the Britts to build up a soon-to-be hegemonic navy.

The first thing to understand about the British Empire is that it was a maritime superpower, much like the United States is today; dominance was maintained through regulation of trade and finance more so than direct means of power projection.

When considering the U.S. and Great Britain, note that a body of water surrounds each (separating them from the conflictual European continent), and that one descends from the other, and that one ends up inheriting its fathers global empire. We have lived in a globalized maritime world order ever since 1815.

And I know I’m hitting you with geopolitics 101 here, a subject many of you already know, but it must be emphasized; being surrounded by water makes your civilization a naval one. You build boats gosh darn it. But here’s the thing, you don’t just build a navy—no. The navy follows from something more integral: Trade. If you’re Brittain, it is commodities that you want to send to France, to Germany, and so on. Theoretically, you give, say, France you largest pre-industrial export—wool—and they give you gold or something like that in return.

But, then what happens? Well, the French don’t want to pay for your wool, and why woold they? They can simply take it from you and sink your ship. So what do the French do? They build a fleet to go take your Anglo-ass-wool, and send you to Davey Jones’ locker in the process.

The King gets word of this, and he’s pissed! So, what does he do? He says fuck you France; I’ll just surround my merchant ship with a flotilla and hella canons. This is how an arms race begins. This is how a navy becomes a navy– but remember, it started from trade.

Here’s “the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century”3 recognizing the same thing, writing just prior to the United States becoming its own maritime superpower:4

Sea power was not the only source of British hegemony, there was a related, but separate component of crucial interest to the topic of modernity: The British established the first modern financial system and central bank, which I intend to discuss in the next post of this series. But I’ll conclude here by discussing the nature of maritime powers in relation to their chief antagonists, the continental powers. Conveniently enough, S.C.M. Paine (Emerita from the U.S. Naval War College) published an article in Foreign Affairs quite recently covering that very subject:

She opens by explaining the distinction. Continental states treat power as measured in land. Most states inherit this reality by virtue of geography; they are hemmed in by neighbors who have, across centuries, been sources of danger.

The great continental hegemons (e.g., Germany, Russia, China, etc.) do not arrive at their worldview arbitrarily. Given their contiguity with other states, they tend to recognize that proximity has always meant vulnerability. It is entirely understandable that they imagine the international order as something to be divided into broad spheres of stability and control. They direct immense resources toward borders, militaries, and they often preempt threats. They have a survival-oriented logic, that is in a sense, more “based.”

By contrast states with an oceanic moat have relative security from invasion. They can thus focus on compounding wealth rather than on fighting neighbors. These maritime states see money, not territory, as the source of power. They advance domestic prosperity through international commerce and through industry, minimizing the tradeoff between military and civilian needs. While continental hegemons gravitate toward finite-game, winner-take-all strategies that are ruinous to the defeated, those vested in the maritime order prefer the infinite game of wealth-compounding, mutually beneficial transactions. They view neighbors as trade partners, not enemies.5

Maritime imperialism is quite different than continental imperialism. Maritime imperialists, with their primary intent of profit, tend to only want subsumption of the world into itself, i.e., into the market. This is a more peaceful alternative. Soft power becomes more relevant than hard power, and you often attract alliances by means of trading partners. The cost of this strategy, on a long enough time-scale seems to be a globalized monoculture. All of which is premised on trade, which for better or worse, seems to work really really well.

But monocultures present a problem: they are not cultures in any meaningful sense. As Hegel understood, identity arises only through determinateness, i.e., being that is what it is, by being distinct from what it is not. Identity is a product of contrast, something that the maritime world order has been fighting against since 1815.

Because art is more tangible than the gene, it becomes a bit easier to recognize what I mean when I suggest that there’s no strict delineation between the two. Art is obviously an expression of culture, but cyclically, it then goes on to influence the very culture that first expressed it.

Like art and culture, genes and culture aren’t simply categories that can be flippantly distinguished. They inform and mold each other in both complementary and reactionary ways, but are ultimately inseparable and essential to one another.

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The mildly amusing fact that Richard Dawkins’ coined the term “meme” tends to overshadow the more profound implications surrounding its denotation, all of which can be found in The Selfish Gene (-classic) and the The Extended Phenotype (-a lesser known and underrated follow-up). But essential Bio-recommendations aside, Meme is used as a technical term describing a unit of cultural transmission.

To elaborate, a meme refers to ideas that replicate, mutate, and compete for survival in a manner structurally analogous to genes. They are units of cultural information, and crucially, they reproduce (via spreading to other minds) and undergo a selection process in doing so. I will emphasize, that a meme’s success does not necessitate that “the best idea won out” or anything like that: a meme can be “true,” but persists not because it is “true;” it persists because it is fit. And fitness in the memetic sense means being memorable, transmissible, resonant and contagious.

A meme’s survival essentially refers to its capacity to “go viral” and persist throughout time within cultural consciousness. Two Examples: uhm, remember dabbing? Yeah. That’s a comparatively short-lived one, but what’s less obvious is that rights are also a meme; they are believed in, and as a notion they have spread really-really well, like, they’ve even gone viral to the point of being institutionalized. Of course, rights have a genuine affect on the world due to their widespread belief - that much is real.

But no, they are not “self evident” in anything resembling an empirical sense. If you go out and look for rights you will come back empty handed. Simply, things like rights are a meme because, like other memes, they are conceptual, they live in your mind, but were not there to begin with, but rather invented and then popularized; memes are learned through sociality. All of that is to say, dabbing and rights are cultural units of information that affect behavior, and they are imitated across time for variate durations based on their perceived utility.

So, with our Dawkinsian lens, we can go back a bit and start seeing art as not merely an ornament of culture, but a replicating organism within it, and culture itself can be viewed as a kind of evolutionary arena in which these symbolic units struggle, hybridize, and entrench themselves with varying degrees of success. The gene shapes the meme by giving human minds certain cognitive proclivities, while the meme shapes the gene by altering the environment in which biological selection occurs.

Final example: religion is a meme. Whether or not it is the one true religion, doesn’t matter here. It’s a meme either way, and I will now use a religion to illustrate how memes can drive evolution by altering selection pressure:

A devout Christian will likely opt to marry (i.e., reproduce with) another Christian. If a high enough percentage of the population does this with regularity, and if we assume there is a combination of genes that predispose someone to become Christian, then those Christian-oriented genes will be rewarded by selection. If this recurs with greater frequency than it does for, say, atheistically-inclined individuals (who carry atheistically-inclined genes), then over generational time we may see an ever increasing percentage of the population contain Christian-oriented genes as it overshadows any competing meme that’s replicating at a lower rate. Over evolutionary time, even if the religion changes or secularizes, we may find remnants of the moral principles, which were disproportionately selected for, remain embedded in the psyche. Certain meme’s will surely cling to certain neuroanatomies and cognitive capacity’s at differing rates, and even small differences of that nature compound over something like, say, two millennia. On a long enough time scale, memetic differences could then express themselves as phenotypic expressions of the gene; ergo, the meme arose from collections of genes, but the meme then affected the very genes that it gave rise to it.

And of course this is the case, because memes are apart of our environment and affect the way we behave. Any Darwinian worth his salt understands that environmental factors - an organisms geography, climate and so on- are ultimately inseparable from its evolution. In other words, the environment shapes the direction toward which a species evolves. As much as a given species affects its environment, so too has its environment affected the species. As ecologists have established, a species that arises from, and remains in a given environment will inevitably become ‘fit’ for that environment over evolutionary time. The species’ very anatomy will conform to this environment, as will its behavior, and in the meantime, the species will shape its environment (e.g., a beaver making a dam, a bird making a nest, a human making a bridge, a human making a religion, a human making laws, etc. etc. etc).

Morals themselves, if their replicability persists across evolutionary time and is selected for, then they will inevitably alter the mind and develop a degree of permanence. Provoking a question: is something truly “good” or is that just what the past environment demanded? I digress. Let’s conclude.

Art, the environment, culture and biology are not only correlative, but function as a unity when properly seen as a complex, multifactorial feedback loop of reinforcing influence. Each component acts on the other, which is why describing culture and genetics as merely convergent subjects remains inadequate. The more you untangle the knot, the more you will find the same rope.

In Part I, I used 17^th century foundational settlements on the American continent as a vehicle to draw a line connecting the Reformation to Protestantism, Protestantism to Calvinism, Calvinism to Puritanism, and Puritanism to the birth of the first modern nation-state. However, the long arc of the Reformation doesn’t stop there; there are still many effects that draw from its general pattern. It’s a revolutionary pattern that finds provenance in the notion of individualism.

It can be characterized through a distinct process seen in various historical phenomena in which power escapes from a central node (e.g., the Pope and/or Catholic Church), to the individual. It’s likely present throughout history to some extent, but most consequentially in the Reformation due to the chain reaction it ignited, pulling the world from the social-political era of absolute monarchy and feudalism, and into the world of the modern nation-state. The King’s subjects became the state’s citizens, and so on.

Within this pattern, “Pope” and “King” are treated as synonyms as they symbolically represent a stabilizing leviathan, who upon dethronement leave a Hobbesian anarchy. An easy example, from which we derive the political terms left and right, is the French Revolution and resultant regicide of Louis XVI, who was beheaded by a violent mass of newly individualized individuals. This lead us to our second (some argue first- some argue third- who cares) “modern nation state.” Prior to that, the same pattern occurred in the American Revolution, which was nothing if not a violent insurrection against King George III.

Preceding both of these conflicts was the English Civil War, and the bulk of my last post discussed 17^th century Puritans who were its contemporaries. The Puritan cause was not an exclusively American phenomenon, and it underpinned the English conflict of the 1640s.1 Puritans backed the Parliamentarian cause as they fought the Royalists and ultimately beheaded King Charles I, but this intrastate conflict finds its roots in a religious dispute that took place under James I. It was under King James that the subjects of my last post left the ‘Old World,’ and it was under this King that Max Weber describes unmendable fault-lines forming between Puritan-Parliamentarians and the Crown.2

I position the English civil war as being more consequential in the historical arc this series aims to describe, as it was more foundational than either the American or French Revolutions that followed. And I began with the 17^th century because that is when this religious pattern most clearly overlaps with the (purportedly secular) political pattern. But make no mistake, the religious to political axis remains to this day, and the two factors are deeply interwoven to the point of being effectually synonymous—it only becomes less apparent as they deviate from the source over time. That 'source' as I argue, is the Protestant Reformation, which established our aforementioned (and now over-mentioned) pattern.

I use the Reformation as a period of history, but not necessarily as a 'thing in itself.' With that, I am in directional agreement with Max Weber who in his seminal The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, recognizes that the source, i.e., the Reformation, has many internal and antecedent sources within. Most importantly Weber notes that there are various “psychological drives which led people to behave in a certain way and held firmly in this path.”3 For the sake of narrative convenience, I will be ignoring most of the precedent factors that led to the Reformation (for now) and will instead treat it as a single unit from which we can trace a simplifying understanding of the chain of events that followed.

Again, it’s quite important to know that this is an era in which the social-political order tumultuously shifts from feudalism and absolute monarchy, and toward the modern nation state. Nation-state’s tend to favor democratic forms of government, which in this model, is understood to be individualized governance. But that much has been treated. There is also an economic form of individualism that not-so-coincidentally arises alongside this arc into modernity:

Capitalism has an ill-defined and much debated origin story, but I often see it treated as an emergent property of the industrial revolution. I am (again) in accordance with Max Weber in inverting the causal arrow here; Weber recognized that there was a discernable “spirit” of capitalism antecedent to its formalization, which finds its roots in Reformed theology. No matter, whether industrialization solidified capitalism, or whether capitalism gave rise to the industrial revolution, both “events” are to be considered emergent properties of Reformation induced individualism (for our purposes). Unfortunately for me, this is where the subject becomes well-trodden ground, as I can now essentially only provide reiteration of Weber’s 1905, The Protestant Ethic and The ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism.

Weber opens the text with a scathing review of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, in which “the first American” reflects on his New England-Puritan father’s instillment of Calvinist workaholism. Franklin treats his upbringing as an essential ingredient in his, albeit secular, religious devotion to working as an end in and of itself. Honesty and repayment of debt are treated as a good, but only for the sake of reputational advantage and accumulation of wealth.

I tell you this to reestablish the (possibly forgotten) connection between Puritanism, Americanism, economic individualism (capitalism), and it’s subcategory of free trade economics (stay tuned). If the aside about Benjamin Franklin did nothing to that end, I may remind you that that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776, but I digress.

Intriguingly, Americanism, Puritanism, capitalism, and free trade-ism are all British inventions. But more importantly, the confluence of these, which emanate from the German Reformation, leads to industrial revolution and subsequent globalization—as profit becomes more important to the individual than does loyalty to the state, or anything higher than the self.

Following from that notion, Weber identifies a world in which “man exists for his business, not vice versa.”4 Capitalism has this ability that Marx accurately recognized, to transform ideas like the “nation-state” and even “nationalism” into subsumed categories contained within itself. As does the individual, a nation begins existing for the sake of business. This leads to logical conclusions such as population replacement. Importing cheap labor becomes advisable so long as it raises GDP—the metric of good governance in the modernized world.

This chrematistic worldview doesn’t solely rely on mass-migration through its mandate of increasingly lower costs of labor, but first it induces a growing endogenous population, which we saw throughout the industrial revolution5. Then it further transforms social norms by integrating women into the workforce to further raise the supply of labor and thus lower its cost. This is when population numbers begin to decline, but capitalism has a solution: Population growth continues until labor can be cheaply replaced by non-organic, technological means: The advent of AI (LLMs) will undoubtedly hasten this process of total human-devaluation.

It is here that I hope to establish the connection between capitalism and liberalism: The first step to understanding liberalism (in the way I want you to understand it) is in the reluctant admiration of the soft power aspect of it. It must be recognized that this aspect works, really really well- or at least it did throughout “the long American century”— an idea we will return to (stay tuned x2). The second step, requires an adjustment of thought. I’m going to need you to think relationally here: Whatever your notion of liberalism is, it is wrong unless embedded within it is the notion of these two, inseparably crucial ideas: (1) international free trade and (2) democracy. The democracy aspect should be obvious, but what is less obvious is its interconnectedness with free trade. Each of the two mutually reinforces the other in a positive feedback loop, yielding a political path dependence that becomes almost impossible to disrupt once established in conjunction with international interdependence.

Assuming you already know what democracy is, what then becomes essential is how it’s mechanistically tied to international free trade, and how one reflects back on the other. With that, I wish to introduce another book even more seminal than Weber’s. Published in 1795, eight years after the drafting of the Constitution, Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant. In my not-quite-humble opinion, Perpetual Peace (which I will henceforth refer to as “PP” because I find that to be rather amusing) formalizes liberal optimism more so than any other written text, and explains quite perfectly the original intent of the liberal worldview.

Like all people who think themselves clever, I tend to like using POSIWID. However, the original intent of things can be just as useful in analysis. Original intent of a thing helps explain the arc of it’s history, and in doing so, reveals inherent mechanistic components–which can then be leveraged against it or defended to its benefit at your discretion. The intersection of democracy, free trade, their synthesis and resultant liberalism, can all be found at the level of original intent–which Part III will explore more deeply than this mere “set up.”

This original intent, I believe, was a noble enough one: Roughly speaking, to reduce conflict and make money. The ‘making money’ part is implicit in any reference of free trade. Yawn. Boring. So we’ll ignore it for now. The ‘reducing conflict’ component however, is actually rather interesting in its less-obviousness. In a follow-up I intend to post, we will walk through the logic behind it, which should serve to explain how it relates to where we started (the Reformation) where we are (the post-materialist 21st century) to where we’re going (the death of our era, and an excitingly bleak entrance into another).

(Stay tuned x3.)

How do you interpret the Bible? Everyone has their own perspective, so it’s not an obvious question to answer. In doing so, you’ll need to go back to when it was authored, itself contentious and done at various dates by various authors. You’ll need to rigorously debate the original meaning of the later canonized texts and question the canonization while you’re at it. And the fractious societal debate can now occur because the spiritual monopoly held by the Catholic Church has become a religious form of a free market economy. The Roman Leviathan is then dethroned and can no longer enforce uniform doctrine of a previously unquestioned Holy Book, much less hold together a Holy Roman Empire. Speaking of which, the academic genre of biblical criticism started in the heartland of the reformation — Germany.

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The study of the Bible led to the study of Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek; the languages that birthed it. So, we went back in time and saw the Bible for what it is; no longer was it the Word of God, but the object of scholarly autopsy. Even among the religious, critical understanding has replaced “spiritual” awe, and is why I suspect that what was once selectively revealed in the grandeur of a Cathedral cannot be understood by modern minds.

To assume more truth leads to more religion, you not only must count on the latter’s validity (which makes one more loyal to something aside from truth), but you then must project the inevitable disagreement of competing versions thereof. If it cannot be enforced into consensus, it is only to trend all of its constituents toward uncertainty.

So, perhaps doubt is not the principle concern here; the beginning of doubt is of precedent consideration: competing certainties —which are heightened after the Catholic veil was lifted and Europe wandered past the curtain. I am suggesting ultimately that “spiritual” concerns (and perhaps all other objects of desire) are subject to a general rule: applying science to mystery leads to undoing of the mystery, which was always the best part.

Yes. Protestantism sowed the seeds of its ultimate demise, but it was inevitable. If you’re a Christian, you have no one to be angry with. There is no one to blame. The curtain was already lifting, Europe only needed to point to whoever was nearest to the rope, i.e., Martin Luther - certainly influential (an understatement), but also just there, and the most human and/or the most active of the many factors to assign culpability. The Reformation was a product of the environment; it takes an ecological approach to see this event and its downstream effects as an over-determined outcome; the ideological climate of the era, politics, culture, technology, and a hundred other self-reinforcing synonyms all acted in concert and served as a unity we could pen as the birth of Modernity. Luther was definitely the product of the Reformation, but so too was he its author.

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Though, what any King of England may find concerning, is the dialectical reliance this commonwealth would come to have on England: That only through negation, through violent insurrection against it could the American national identity emerge. The Declaration of Independence which formalized this separation was much later, of course, but that is not the “breaking away” I am interested in. As will be detailed, the “American” split from England happened before the 18th century and it didn’t even occur in America. But enough talk of America. Contrary to what the opening paragraph may suggest, this piece is not necessarily about the United States or England. The Subject is the Puritans, and they may only be understood through interactions with their aforementioned, empire-sized Objects.

Before going any further, I want to introduce “Part I” through providing the reasoning behind the coming series—which is to provide support for several provocations; the first of which is the most mild: I claim that there’s continuity between the Reformation, Liberalism, Protestantism, Puritanism, the United States, and modernization writ large. In exploring that chain of events, (2) I position the U.S. as a Puritan-Protestant nation; I claim that to be an American is to be a Puritan and vice versa. I am not saying that as a compliment nor as a critique to Americans. My maximalist assertion takes things a bit further: (3) To be a protestant is to be an American; this makes the Reformation the real founding of the United States. The latter claim requires further elaboration, which I intend to provide in forthcoming posts.

In my theory, yes, we could simplify matters and say that George Washington gave rise to the United States. But the “Founders” arrived in the “Matthew” of the national story, not in its Genesis. Above and beyond Washington, forewent Martin Luther.

I. Puritans in the 17th century

Uniquely, and as an inversion to the biological norm, the 17^th century Puritans didn’t arise from an environment. Having left their home, they came to an empty space and created an environment. This was done through the establishment of institutions and these institutions, both mimetically and genetically propagated more Puritans. They were really quite good at establishing these–which makes total sense. They were essentially concerned with two things; (1) church and (2) the bible. The first one is intuitive enough; a church is an institution–yes. But the second needs appendage: Why were the Puritans Puritan? The short answer: they were not Catholic. Not Catholic at all! And what do not-Catholics do? Fundamentally, they read and interpret the bible for themselves. A prerequisite for Sola scriptura is literacy. And the Reformation (from which Puritanism descended) relegated the doctrine of Church authority to the individual’s interpretive capacity. The aim being: forming a personal relationship with God. And a relationship with no intermediaries—none—not the Church and certainly not Mary.

Anyway, the very-self-governing-Puritans intended to cohabit the very-non-democratic and specifically monarchical kingdom of heaven with their children—which necessitated their children’s reading of the Logos—the Word of God. So important was this, that they established the first public schools in the New World. Mandatory youth education and the tax-derived funding thereof is now commonplace, but this was exceedingly unusual for the world of the late 1640s. Specifically, it was in 1647 when the comically titled, ‘Old Deluder Satan Laws’ were decreed. As directed, schools were established from which the Bible could be read, with the stated intent as follows: “It being one chiefe project of ye ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures.”[1] 1Of spiritual concern, Satan was placed at the center. Of practical concern, schools were where morality could be homogenized and imposed in a top-down manner—and I actually say that as a compliment to schools and to Puritans alike.

Whether this was the intention of not, schools functioned as a form of confessionalization—which led to modernization not long after. But yes, the Puritans planted schools, churches, and a lot of them. Colin Woodard’s’ (amazing) book, American Nations, describes the Puritan vision for their new society as “a moralistic nation of churches and schoolhouses.”2

Through this vision, they institutionalized far more than any other settlers, to a degree that still affects the country deeply. Speaking of, have you ever heard of Harvard? The one established in 1636? Puritans still occupy it. Albeit in secular form, they are just as puritanical.

I’m exaggerating. But crucially, institutions in the past prefigured those to come. As far as institutions go, Harvard’s an obvious one, but here’s a less obvious one: The United States’ Constitution. O, I can hear it now; “Harvard is largely secular! And Thomas Jefferson was barely a Christian, if one at all. He was no Puritan!” Settle down! I know not whether that Virginian aristocrat was a Christian, but indeed, he was a Puritan. No matter! All will be treated later (stay tuned). For now; sure, the constitution may very well have been drafted by a Deist, nevertheless, the ideas therein were anything but innovative.

The precepts of the constitution were practiced in 17th (not 18th) century New England. All of it had been prefigured by the Puritans, all of it had been done before—even down to bicameralism! But not only bicameralism; there were three branches of government with an executive, legislative, and judicial branch in 1630!3 Well over a century before Jefferson’s quill had touched parchment, the structure behind his writing was already there.

To specifically enumerate the colony’s political structure, it consistently had a governor (i.e., an executive), magistrates and deputies (i.e., a legislature), and a General Court (i.e., a judic-…. you get the idea).4

So how was it that the constitution was practiced before it was ever written? New England (and more-so in England itself) in the thirty-year period between 1620 and 1650 was rife with debate regarding ecclesiology, i.e., church governance. Many distinctly political questions were being asked, e.g., who in the church should be capable of using “the negative voice” (i.e., veto power to be employed against any less-than-satisfactory decision). This along with many other concerns led to much contemplation surrounding church government, power in general, and a Reformed distribution thereof. Like the future nation that would arise from these Puritans, power could have come from three main sources. The brethren (simply members of the church), the elders, or the pastor. There’s no pope, but who lead’s a congregation? Is the pastor sovereign? Are the elders sovereign? Should the church operate as a democracy, where each member gets a share of power?

The Puritans opted for a degree of separation between each, each wielding some degree of influence, but none being sovereign. This is, again, analogous to the contemporary; citizen, legislature, and executive class of the intrastate power struggle. It’s a struggle which republican government attempts to mediate through “balancing” each against the other—thereby constraining each.

And as a reminder, the whole project of Protestantism was to individualize spiritual concerns—and thus reduce—if not obviate the power of a church. Ironically, the Puritans found a problem with the resultant individuation. It’s a problem that the founding fathers, and all Reformed sects seemed to have run into: The people, the citizens, the brethren, the unwashed masses, whatever you want to call them, are not very good at making decisions, and need someone to “represent” them. So the Puritans, after fierce debate decided that this tripartite, layered approach to governing the church would be a tolerable compromise. Ultimately, the format of their ecclesiological ideas reflected their political ideas. The church structure became the structure of the commonwealth, in mutually reinforcing fashion.5 Whether politics affected the religion first, or whether religion affected the polity is redundant, because they ultimately would behave as a feedback loop, but the answer here seems clear: Religion preceded politics, and as I argue, shaped it.

I’ll finish this point by citing Rev. John Norton (the leading pastor of Massachusetts Bay in 1648), who was himself reiterating John Calvin when he apophatically described the pre-constitutional balance of powers. Norton presents their polity as a mixed one—of aristocracy and democracy—which I will simplify to republicanism.6

Along with general individualism, It would seem then that the “advent” of America’s democratic republicanism wasn’t some grand or difficult decision for the framers, but the simplest; the one that was already sociologically engrained; and the one that descends from Puritanism which descends from Calvinism, which descends from Lutheranism and the Reformation. It really makes the whole “separation of church and state” thing quite funny.

I have much more to say on this matter, but I’ll end “part-one” here: I want to conclude by recognizing how Puritanism affects us today. To bridge that topic, I’ll start by defending a category of heretofore unjustified claims made throughout the text. I called Thomas Jefferson a Puritan in spite of him not being one. I did the same to whomever happened to be on Harvard property at the time of the opening paragraph’s writing—in spite of full awareness that Harvard is now almost entirely secular. Largely, I was only making a provocative generalization, of course. However, it is meant to be taken at least half seriously. Harvard was made by puritans, and you know what? So was Thomas Jefferson! Whether they be cultural, structural or biological, such things carry residual effects. That is not a controversial claim. Look how the institution of Judaism, the Bible, and everything therein affected the Puritans over two millennia after being established. Look how they affect you today! Memes, in the Dawkinsian-sense, matter. Puritanism may have been strictly a religion at some point. But anything that institutionalizes, anything that maintains genetic material, and anything that affects the human psyche so strongly and for so long as Puritanism did to the Puritans; it becomes more than religion, and it becomes engrained. Which leads me to my final “appeal to authority.” This time, from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, titled “Implicit Puritanism in American moral cognition.” The results are semantically commensurate with the title, but this quote feels like a good way to close:

“not only devout American Protestants but even non-protestant and less religious Americans exhibited effects associated with traditional work and sex values. This is consistent with the argument that America’s Puritan-Protestant tradition has powerfully shaped the intuitive morality of American culture. According to our theorizing, it is American culture, and not necessarily personal devotion to a particular religion, that underlies these phenomena.”7